Now, obviously i wanna get the biggest HDD for my monies, but what is SATA I/II/III and RAID etc ???


I have this mo-bo
http://www.asus.com/uk/Motherboards/M5A99X_EVO/

which HDD would be the best for me ?



Thanks in advanced

Sata is just the how the hard drive connects to the motherboard but each version has different Speeds.
As your motherboard supports up to 6Gb/s you can buy Sata III hard drivers. You can Also buy Sata I and II
as it is backwards compatible.

Someone else will have to explain what RAID is.

As for Companies, Weston Digital is a good company, Always had them, Very rarly Die.
I've had my 500gb HDD for 5 years now and is still going, Little slower now but thats to be exspected.

WD is my choice to..

As for RAID, as far as i know, you use raid with more than 1 hd, preferably same size. and then you use raid to store one little piece of each file on each hd, just like bit-torrent or file-share and so on witch would make your disks work faster together.. .. you can also use raid to kinda mirroring your disk, so if you have two disks, you save the same file on both, so you have a backup if one of them dies.. but as for normal use, you dont want to use or think of this things...
If someone else have anything else to teach me, or correct me, please do so!!

As a general rule anything by Western Digital will be fine, which one though depends on how it will be used in your system:

The vast majority of internal HDDs are SATA3 (sometimes called SATA6 because the theoretical maximum data throughput of the controller is 6Gbs per second)
not that it matters as most HDDs can't transmit and receive data fast enough to be limited by even a SATA1 connection, the reason for this is mainly for widespread compatibility.

RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) comes in two main forms:

Striping: Connecting multiple disks together for higher data throughput.
Mirroring: Connecting them for redundancy (essentially automatic data duplication).

Your motherboard has 6 SATA3 ports so theoretically you could have 6 500GB HDDs using a RAID stripe and get great data throughput but in reality the motherboards RAID controller is software only so you lose efficiency as more drives are added, personally I'd say no more than 3 drives before you'd want to have a hardware PCI-E RAID card.

To be perfectly honest you don't need a HDD RAID stripe these days unless you are working with huge amounts of data e.g. video editing.
For high data throughput (games etc) you are better off just getting one or two SSDs, I have 2x 128GB Samsung 840 EVOs on a RAID stripe giving me 800MBps data throughput for games/applications and a 2TB WD Green for data storage.

Which solution you implement will ultimately depend on budget, what I use will set you back roughly £170, and if you choose an SSD you will need to leave 15% of the capacity empty for maximum performance.

RAID requires volumes to be the same size, although that doesn't mean drives as a whole have to be the same size they should be for peak performance and efficiency.

thanks a lot, now i'm much the wiser.
Lemme see whats available within my budget and i'll check here before i buy.

I already have a 128gb SSD, so really want my OS on that (have that atm) and then maybe 1 HDD for files (pics/movies/invoices etc) one HDD for all my games/steam/origin.

As Steam is quite big (maybe 500gb in total especially with new games being about 25gb each) would it be better to run Steam on 2x500gb or 1 x 1tb HDD ? then run my FILES HDD in raid? or just as a seperate drive ?

Thanks in advance.

That's a lot of games, I only have 80GB worth. If you're going to run games off a HDD you'd want a WD Black, 2x 500GB on a RAID stripe would decrease load times. Check prices tho sometimes it's worth getting 2x 1TB.

my steamfolder is 663GB..

I run steam from 2x500Gb drives but still don't have enough room
I need to figure out how to change the directories for uplay and origin to move then from my SSD.